Cormac McCarthy

• The Wall Street Journal runs a tremendous interview of Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country For Old Men and The Road, featuring gems like…

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

• “Someone once told me that there is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don’t lie to Google. Period. We type in what we’re thinking — good, bad, and ugly. There’s probably no piece of information that would better show what’s on someone’s mind than their stream of searches.” Context: here and here.
• Who says a grocery store has to stock Pepsi? Every grocery store stocks Pepsi. If anybody really needs Pepsi, they can get it at a gas station. But if they want hard-to-find and high-quality, they go see this guy:

There’s something to be said for offering customers something they can’t get anywhere else…

but sometimes that means not offering them what they can get everywhere else.

Ommmmmm.

Heads up, friends: This post is part of ENGINE’s decade-closing blogsplosion. Click here to witness the rest of the damage. The aughties!

The prose is deliberately accessible, the warning alltoo-contemporary, and the novel gripping beyond belief.

— The Telegraph

The Road is not a science fiction, not an allegory, and not a critique of the way we live now, or of the-way-we-might-live-if-we-keep-on-living-the-way-we-live-now. It poses a simpler question, more taxing for the imagination and far closer to the primary business of fiction-making: what would this world without people look like, feel like? These questions McCarthy answers magnificently.

— The New Republic

You should read this book because it is exactly what a book about our future ought to be.

— Esquire